Reuse and Repurpose

I have always stressed the need to focus more budget into development of companies web systems and IT development cycles, in order to make use of relevant content to be added dynamically into web pages. It will make your site more relevant.

Say you chose to have a block in one of your page designs, set to pull in say a quote from a customer success story. What this means, is that when the new customer story is published on your site, the content gets pulled into your other pages by tagging. If customer is related to archiving, then in your archiving product pages you could dynamically show the new customer content in that page, either by highlight of quote, or image or story title. The back-end system would have system rules in place to look for a content type, and an associated tag, and if found, then pull in the fields you set it to pull into the relevant page. This setup requires close collaboration between IT and the content expert to be set up correctly.

This example model can and should be used for the mass of technical documentation that is created in large companies. There needs to be extensive planning and thought around all the collateral creation, to put the content in a format such as XML and rendition it to be HTML, PDF or just chunk out and reuse on other pages of your site. the technical product team could be creating a new wonderful white paper in PDF format, say they enter it into a system that transforms the content into XML, then that XML is formatted and chunks up the content to now show product specifications right on the product page. Meaning the product web page has rules behind it to look for content type, tags and then the XML attribute fields that should show in page and where – and then you have a truly dynamic site. You are saving money by not using the time it would take for that technical documentation/product owner to request an update to the web page – by the web team.

You can start by looking at where content comes, from who, what they create, and then you refine that system so that the content can then be put into a format and used by your CMS system to be re-purposed, and the system can create multiple different renditions of that content for various audiences.